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Acquia Partner Strategy

When I joined Acquia 18 months ago, one of our top priorities was communicating our partner strategy. As a priority, it’s still right up there, an indication that, while we have made progress, we need to be more transparent, more communicative than we have been.

Having a strong and diverse ecosystem around Drupal is vital for the continued health and growth of Drupal. Code contributors are key of course, but so are other roles from documentation to marketing to organization of conferences and camps. Acquia has an express goal of facilitating and growing this ecosystem, through sponsorships, internal initiatives, and partnerships.

We’ve been doing a lot of sponsoring, including dozens of Drupal Camps and meet ups, and premier sponsorships for Drupalcon and Lullabot’s Do It With Drupal. In addition to our team’s contributions to Drupal code, we’ve also hosted and sponsored several code sprints.

In more non-technical efforts, we have individuals like Kieran Lal, aka Amazon, who spend a considerable amount of their day evangelizing Drupal and working as part of the Drupal Association on conferences and major projects, including spearheading the recent drupal.org redesign. One of the lesser known Acquia initiatives is marketing, where we have created, and will be augmenting, marketing materials that can be used by the entire Drupal community.

Front and center to everything we do though, is our partner program, which remains perhaps the least understood element of our plans to foster the Drupal ecosystem. Designed to expand and grow our partners’ businesses while expanding Drupal’s presence and reputation in the enterprise, the Acquia partner program borrows from other successful partner programs in the open source and enterprise software world. Our leadership team has been involved in building some very successful programs, from Lotus to Baan, Documentum to Watermark Software. To enhance our ability to understand partner "thinking", we brought in Peter Guagenti from Razorfish.

The Acquia partner program has several elements that benefit partner organizations. A partial list from our Services & Training Partner programs:

The examples continue, but hopefully you get the idea. We’re committed to helping to grow and sustain the Drupal ecosystem, it’s the only way that Drupal will prosper, which itself is a precondition for Acquia’s success. We hope to maintain complete transparency on our program and are endeavoring to do more communications. Matt Ackley has recently assumed the mantle to manage our service partner program, if you have more questions, don’t hesitate to contact him, or for that matter me or any of your other favorite Acquians.